Subject Matter Experts and Their Role in Digital Marketing Strategy - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Establishing expertise and thought leadership is key to the success of your digital marketing strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, learn how your team can work with (or become!) subject matter experts in your niche, giving consumers of your content a chance to learn from the best.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Good morning everybody in Moz land. I'm Eric Enge, I'm the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting. I'm here to do a Whiteboard Friday here for you today. By the way, I'm also co-author of "The Art of SEO" together with the beloved Rand Fishkin.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about subject matter experts and their role in your digital marketing strategy. They play an incredibly important role. I see lots of businesses out there that publish sites and they put content out there and there's really no identity behind them. It's really important because, at the end of the day, your target audience wants to attach to a person more than they want to attach to a nameless entity. They want to feel like they're interacting with real people.

By the way, your subject matter expert could be subject matter experts, plural, and that's good, but incredibly important that you have something, somebody where people can attach to them in a material way. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, you have to have an expert or go home. You're just not going to be able to succeed in a big way going forward if you don't have some sort of established expertise for your business. That's my view of it. You just have to have that expert, or you need to go home.

So with that in mind, you run into the next problem. Your experts are human beings. There are 24 hours in a day, right? They have limited time to do what they need to do, and that actually limits how much scale you can get out of their activity. Maybe they only have two hours a day. And if that's the case, then that limits how much content and how much communication of that expertise can happen out in the wild.

So I want to talk now a little bit about how do we scale their efforts so you get more out of your expert, and that's where we lead to a few ideas I have over here. All right.

Best thing to do is see if you can get some smart young people, don't necessarily have to be young, but smart people to assist your subject matter expert in a number of different ways. Some great things you can do to help them out, one is you can research article topics. I know for myself, when I get up on Saturday morning, which is when I tend to write my columns, I sometimes spend two hours trying to come up with an idea for what the column is going to be about. It can be very painful, very frustrating. If you have somebody there helping you, coming up with ideas and really giving you a set of things that you can look at and think about for that next column or blog post or whatever it is, it can be a big, big help for you.

You can even potentially have them draft articles for you. You need to be careful about this. I'm actually not a big fan of ghost writing, because keeping in mind that people want to attach to an expert, if the thing is truly ghost-written, well, it's not really the expert that's writing it, and to me that relationship gets weakened. So I think it's very important to have the subject matter expert really be involved in writing the article. But you can have someone draft an article as long as the subject matter expert sort of recuts it and tears it apart, not just simple editing, but actually turns it into their own voice. Can be very helpful though to have that drafted article.

Find influencers. Very, very important thing to do. Who do you want that subject matter expert to build relationships with? That can be a lot of work to figure out too. You can use a variety of tools to figure this out. You can do social media research, just bum around on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever your social site of preference is, or all of them, and help identify people that you want have the subject matter expert interact with. Figure out how to contact them, do research on what they like, help get that relationship process going. Subject matter expert has to be the one to do the outreach, but you can make it easier for them by doing some research up front.

Next thing, just monitoring social media sites. I'm going to use Twitter as an example. Find tweets by key people, maybe by influencers, maybe just by good friends. Have your assistant, basically, help the subject matter expert by monitoring, in this case Twitter, more frequently and more thoroughly than they can on their own. So that's a very valuable service. So you look at tweets by key people and tweets by others, direct questions that get asked of you, or breaking news, all these sorts of things to allow the subject matter expert to be responsive without having to live in the social media site.

Next up, you can draft actually social media posts, be it a tweet or Google+ or Facebook or whatever it is, and then send your subject matter expert proposed things that they can put out on social media. Again, a big time-saver.

You can curate content for them. The assistant can go ahead and research other articles and find things going on and actually suggest comments on those articles.

Creating graphics, I'm lucky enough that I have someone who is able to create graphics for me. So I can walk in, in the morning and say, "Hey I want to do this post today," and I can sketch out a little design, here's what I want to do, I want this, sort of build a little design for them, and then they go off and create it and then two hours later I have a beautiful graphic which I can go ahead and use for my post. I actually end up with a lot of custom graphics in my posts that way, which is really cool.

They can also just edit your articles. Hopefully, that's not too painful for them, because hopefully your subject matter expert is a good writer. But this is another valuable service. It's really great to have that person, that other set of eyes on the article to help you with that.

The big key in all these services that I've talked about, which will help us lead to our happy SME down here in the bottom, is all about the relationship between the assistant and the subject matter expert. The assistant has to be doing things the subject matter expert finds valuable. So, if I'm a subject matter expert and I don't find your curating content for me valuable because I'm just too opinionated or I don't want to put that stuff out there, then having you do that for me doesn't help. So the subject matter expert and the assistant or assistants, as the case may be, have to build a special relationship so that they understand how to work together and really make it work.

So that's some ideas for you on how you take your subject matter expert, you give them a little more time, and help them scale their efforts, leading to a happy subject matter expert and good results for your business.

It's important to recognize that sometimes the subject matter experts within your organization are horrible writers. But if they have the knowledge and you have the words then a partnership has to be created! Sometimes the assistant is the main driving force for getting that content out the door because they set the expert up to do their thing and do it well.

usually when the topics are like design or illustrations the subject matter expert are not always the great writers so yes choosing the assistant carefully is very important! Either subject matter expert or assistant should be a kick ass writers or else things will go a lil messy!

Since I suspect there are many reading this who serve as their own content creator (or expert), I give the following advice re. writer's block: Always have a pen & pad or tablet or something available for jotting down content ideas anytime of the day, any location. Some of my best thinking was recorded on the go and emailed to myself via my iPhone!

Thanks Eric, I guess that is why i spend so much time on G+ lately to watch the minds of many of the SEO guys/gals sharing their great knowledge....pick, choose & absorb...then off to do my thing...appreciate your share here.

I am 100% on board with this system Eric. Since day 1 I have been doing this at my company. Especially when working with clients in industries I am unfamiliar with. The first thing we do in instances like this is get all the clients social media profiles. We tell them we are no longer going to be sending out social media messages for your company we are going to be sending them out for you on behalf of your company. Your absolutely right...people identify with a person 100 times more then they identify with a small business (unknown) company logo.

Also I wanted to add when we talk to clients right off the bat we tell them we are experts on the internet, but we are not expert musicians, electricians, landscapers, jewelers (or whatever service or product they may provide). The client is the expert and to make the correct content for the site we are going to need to work very closely with them to draft professional "expert material". Now most clients are busy!

So the best way we found to go about this is...Come up with content to write. There are many different ways to do this, including: topics by search volume, social media shares (on competitors sites), and trending industry topics. Then we do as much research as we possibly can to make the load on the client as light as possible. After we come up with the research we begin drafting the piece. At this point we write out as much of the content as we can before we get the client involved. Maybe there is a key process that their company does different than "industry standard" or for any reason really there is just some stuff you cannot get (it could be stuff you haven't even thought of because you are not an industry expert). At this time you need to review the material with the client (we like to aim for 15 minutes or less - like I said clients are busy and rarely have time!

So make sure you outline the topic for them. Include the major highlights you have and subtopics you are going to cover. Ask them if there is anything you are missing. Ask them if there is a special way they do a certain topic. The best thing we have found is to take the entire piece and make an outline (just like in grade school) you have your intro a couple bullets with subtopics.

Then you have each subtopic with a few bullet points about major points within each sub topic and you have your conclusion or closing to the piece. When you line everything up and make it extremely easy for the client to see where you are going they can quickly scan the piece and see if you have obtained the whole picture or if you are missing key points along the way.

This is the most effective way we have found to get clients with limited time to approve and assist in making some really spectacular content for their website.

Great WBF Eric. Getting the right assistant can be a challenge, especially with finding a good fit in terms of shared interests and working style.

Positioning an assistant position as an apprenticeship opportunity were the assistant(s) can gain expertise by supporting the SME in the activities your mentioned is a great way to find great, like-minded candidates.

SME is really an expert in a subject or product. I loved that you mention connection with our audience. If we use an outsource we loose the expert part of it. What ever we talk about or blog about we need to make sure we know what we are talking about because end users will eventually have questions. If we do not know our product then we are not the expert. Connect thru our words. Thanks for the nice presentation.

Nice WBF Eric. I am also a big fan of your blog. I like item #1 on your list that an assistant can do to help content experts scale. We've used this ourselves and it's extremely effective. The way we approached it (because we didn't have an assistant to rely on for this):

I sent around an email requesting 7 people to brainstorm individually and send me at least 10 blog post topics that they thought our readers would enjoy.

I got back more than 100 content ideas

We've used about 30 of them

After an entire year has passed, we still have 70 ideas out there that we haven't used yet

This keeps us on track with posting more often and also keeps us from getting stuck in "ruts" of posting content that is not covering a broad enough range of topics.

I agree that you should use writers with expertise in the subject area, but it can prove very difficult to find specialised writers within certain niches.

For example, we have a client who sells Portable Appliance Testers (PAT) to electricians, the best writer we could find was a technical writer experienced in electronics.. we couldn't find a PAT specialist with copywriting abilities.

When it comes to content writing, one thing we should not forget that these writers are providing contents as a profession. Niche specialized writers are almost nil otherwise they will be out of work. This field requires jack of all things but master of none kind person and it is full of such writers. But those who are really experts in a niche, I don't think they will write for content marketing sake only.

Eric that is a much better idea. I would be comfortable picking the experts brain to get the information thank me trying to figure the product that i have no idea of. Think like a consumer and asks questions to get in the experts brain power. ummmmm.

Great topic Eric. Having an expert or being an expert is very important for start up and b2b companies as their business mainly based on relationship and identity is one of the key point.

While i was listening your comment about having youngs in the company, I remembered when i was managing a group of youngs last year for a project and i was thinking how different their understanding and behavior. Then i found an interesting video by Jane Sunley which talks about X and Y generation which I think very important for X generation who are in management with Y generation.

Great post and I couldn't agree more about leveraging your SME's time by scaling their efforts. The success in doing really comes down to playing to everyone strengths.

Take a lawyer for example. Whatever level you’ve worked with a lawyer before you know their time is expensive. You will see a lawyers time upwards of $250 - $500. If you are telling the lawyer they need to be producing two blog post a week (eight blog post a month) and these blog post need to be top quality; the first thing they think is, well I can have my lawyers write these blog posts, and right there is where you kind of need to take a step back and see the bigger picture of the strategy. Take a look at what really is going to be the best way to get that done so that you leverage your lawyer’s time and expensive billable hours. Just because they are legal experts doesn't necessarily translate into writing a post with a message that appeals to your buyer persona and answers their questions.

We use a highly leveraged proven process for working with our SME's that has been instrumental in the content production for our client's campaigns. We did a Google on Air Hangout and post for anyone who wants to learn some strategies for leveraging your SME's time

Respecting Your Experts Time with an Efficient Content Extraction Process

In most of the cases and most of the time the real subject matter expert is the client, whom we work for. If we can make him think about giving his Ideas and inputs on content creation (even for the newsletter or blogs or articles etc.) and making another expert (the actual writer) available to him could result into a great piece of content.

Since the client himself is one who has the most knowledge of his business and industry, so any Idea that arose from his mind would be exactly related to his industry. The writer only needs to write down his ideas into a engaging content, that exactly what the writer is expert of. Spending some time on the web exploring the Client's Idea could make any expert writer an expert in that industry. Your thought would be appreciated.

Something I have been trying to push for a long time with clients is exactly this where you have a person from the brand who is an influence in the space. The problem is that some times clients do not want to be a face of the brand so you need to think of other options like creating a person for the brand, or using another staff member. We created a cartoon persona for a careers brand and it worked very well.

You had an interesting quote: "Your target audience wants to attach to a person more than a nameless entity" I strongly agree with this, but struggle consistently doing this in a blog with multiple writers. Do you find this is best solved by helping the different writers have a similar tone? If so, what is a good way to do this? If not, what is a good solution?

If the writers are consistently associated with the site, that can work fine. It's OK to give people the opportunity to relate to any one of a number of people. In which case, there is not need to modify the tone. But, the key is, you need to have a long term relationship with them.

Thank you Eric for the Great Post!! I found that the whole concept you have mentioned on the white board is quite interesting. As i am the only contributor of the content at my residence i just love your post. I have also liked the step by step procedure you have mentioned on the white board. A perfect procedure to create a content. Really a worthy post to share.

I love the idea of have a subject matter expert, a real person, represent a company/brand, rather than impersonal "we at company xyz" writing the articles.

I understand your points about the downsides of using ghost writers, but what are your thoughts about writers using pseudonyms? Perhaps the subject is a bit taboo the writer does not want to use their name or they might be writing as the brand person (something like "Ronald McDonald" keeping a blog about fast food). It would be a specific voice and someone who knows the area well though. Do you think that would affect the "authenticity" of the writing?

Pseudonyms can work, but you should be obvious about it, such as Ronald McDonald in my view. It still gives people someone to attach to. If you are not obvious about it, i.e. try to disguise it, you expose yourself to some real risk of bring found out!

Great Whiteboard Friday! Thorough, interesting and enjoyable to read. I particularly love the attention you have paid to Subject Experts, Ghost Writers etc because we do need these experts. While it is true that most web writers are not "niche" or "specialised" there are many great writers who work in content writing, and as long as they understand the market these specialists can be extremely helpful.

I was unfamiliar with the term "Subject Matter Expert" and I found the whole concept very interesting. The thing is since I am at this time the only contributor of content to my site i must be the resident SME.. Thanks I like it! No seriously speaking this was really interesting content worthwhile sharing. ;-)

Thanks Eric for the post and thanks again for that interview with Matt Cutts. I mark one amusing trend in this subject. Wannabe experts try to write about hot topic and Real experts write when they feel hot about a topic. But what a real expert writes becomes hot topic for the wannabe experts in the industry. Any thought?

Interesting way of putting it. To dig into that a little bit, the real expert puts a lot of effort into truly mastering a topic area, and this ends up making them passionate about what they learn. Others may be interested in the area, but afraid to invest the effort (fear of failure perhaps), don't commit the time to doing it, or worse, just lazy.

Thanks for the reply. Agree to that. But the main issue with new entrants to any subject or field is that the existing information is so vast and diversified that 99.99% of them feel overwhelmed and lost in the web rather than experimenting on new avenues. Both universe and web are full of unexplored things that can be achieved by any one with patience and hard work as you have mentioned here. But mostly all feel safe to go behind the existing one and the result is the one who tries to explore the new avenue wins the race and becomes the expert. So, how one can keep balance between these two states?

There is an important subtlety here. If you go back to the business world prior to the web, each major market space probably had 3, 4, or 5 recognizable brands at MOST. For more than a decade now, the web messed that up a bit, and suddenly we had a world where there could be 20 or more companies doing well in a given space do to new online marketing tactics.

But, we are returning to that world where there are only a few major players in each market space, and THEN there may be a number of niche players.

Entering a crowded market space? Then you better find a niche you can play in of don't do it!

When we talk about web, the web is growing with such volume, there is every chance that new players can fit into the scenario. I don't think major players can cover the whole of web. So for small players, it would be better to play with small targets or play at sub-level of a niche.

Well, SME term is new to me. I just came to know about Subject Matter Expert from this post. Well what i think are following:

SME is the key person if you really want to engage your customers through content, may be text or graphics.

Finding extremely hot topic which has less chance of failure is main challenge of SME.

There are many companies out there dedicated for content marketing but do not have SME post, they are only focusing on updating the blog site with any type of article, they do not bother about - is this article is enough powerful to attract the readers or not?

Website or quality of a post is not decided by how frequently you are updating it, but how frequently readers are engaging with this, how many likes, shares and comments are coming.

Finally, giving 2 hours or more time for finding hot topic and then curating them with the help of customized image once in a week is far more better than writing general posts everyday just for the name of Fresh Content. Here comes SME :)

Initially i was thinking this post is all about Social Media Expet(SME) but Subject Matter Expert(SME) is really different from the first. Finally what can i see :

Subject Mater Specialist - takes care of How the post should be written (Pre-Production)

Social Media Expert - Takes care of how the post should be promoted (Post-Production)

So you go to work you Social Media Expert into the mix! Yes, giving the Subject Matter Expert help in the actual promotion of their content is definitely something others can do. This way they don't need to think about social media details, newsletters, press releases, reaching out to other influencers, etc. It is a good division of labor.

The other thing your comment made me think about is what happens when you try to rent outside content creation help which you seek to present as the opinion of an expert. Make absolutely SURE that you are actually getting an expert on the topic. Trained monkeys who learn about a topic by fishing around on the web for 30 to 60 minutes does not an expert make!

Great point/post. We tried to outsource content many times w/dismal results (since no one wanted to or had the time to do it). We started to "require" people to do it (as they are the EXPERTS on the service) and had great results.

Outsourcing the Content Management process would not be successful all the time. Other company would not provide that much of effort since this will be a kind of client project for them. However personnel in your company would give more leverage on In-House sites.

A Subject Matter Expert not only writes article, but is one who shares his experience of the sector. By going through the video and way to call up SME - its important to not to look to outsource but involve participation from the experts to share there thoughts and views

Not only will the points and insights will be much relevant, but it will engage the user interaction in a much better way. To tell you - we are inviting many Industry experts to provide answers to Automobile Question & Answers. The detailing, which is shared comes only with sheer experience and no outsourced agency can even match it

I'm a big fan of finding influencers. Not only do more heads think better than one, but more social accounts share better than one. Citing the influencer for the content they provide will ad credibility to that individual, who will most likely love that their opinion is good enough for you to use. Involve them in the creation and editing process so they will have some ownership, then they will be more likely to share the content because it includes their thoughts and work. Nice WB!

Tapping into expert resources is something we are working on. There are strong similarities to media relations, in that you need to also find a person who not only is an expert, but who can be quotable, easy-ish to understand, AND willing to be accessible after the event for followup questions and comments.

As you so well noted, the experts are often buried doing their research and work, so interest, time and willingness to be accessible are a major issue. If they can't cheerfully commit to that, look for another expert.

When looking at our own copywriting agency, 90-95% of the time, each and every client gets to maintain the same writer, which in turn keeps the same voice for the client(s) blog. We've noticed that clients are very eager to catch this (change of voice) in their content if a new writer appears on the scene.

Not every writer will be able to keep the same voice. Knowing that all of our writers are subject matter experts, how could we transition this process so that our clients are happy with the "new writer" transition?

I think that writer transitions are very difficult. For my part, I am not a fan of ghost writing content for someone. So if a writer is in fact an expert on a topic, and not someone who gets somewhat smart quickly be reading stuff on the web, all are best served by a long term commitment of that person to the business.

If the writer changes then that should be transparent to everyone, including the public that sees the published articles. As such, it is like any employee transition.

As for the ghost writing comment, if that is what is happening, the person who has their name on the content should re-write the article anyway in my opinion. If they are the named expert, it is THEIR voice that matters, not that of the writer. If their voice is not what drives the final content, then their name should not be on it.

There is the great post Eric. The SME has the greatest role in digital marketing strategy. With the choosing of the writer is very important and careful decision. Usually when the topics are like design or illustrations the subject matter expert are not always the great writers. Using of writers with expertise in the subject area, it can prove very difficult to find specialized writers within certain niches. Thanks for sharing the great post, this post is very helpful and value-able for SEO persons.

We started to invest more time in and energy in our support team and our customers knowledge and expertise which we do with blog contributions from them and yes we can see a definitive change in our blog posting click-through rates.

We do however ensure the marketing team run a content review before broadcasting a contributor's post. Important to keep them in the loop as there may be key marketing messages within the contributor's content that just needs that subtle emphasis but overall these guys really add value to our readership.

Just look around your office or speak to your customers and ask if they have a story to tell, see who are the potential SMEs.

2 example postings below on our blog that performed really well for us.